Video review: "Wonder Woman"

I sometimes stop to think why “Wonder Woman” is such a superior super-hero flick.

After all, it is fairly conventional in its storytelling structure: a standard-issue origin tale, in which a reluctant youngster acquires extraordinary abilities/status, applies them in the greater world in what they think are appropriate ways and later learns the pitfalls of that whole great powers/great responsibilities rubric.

It starts, I think, with this heroine and this actress. The superhero genre has gone through some interesting changes over the past two decades, but it’s still heavily predominated by male filmmakers presenting male characters for a male audience. The women are, literally, the background characters and the sidekicks.

Even Wonder Woman started out that way, as a third-act boost to -- and in many ways the best thing about – last year’s “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”

There was a sad, reluctant quality to Wonder Woman in her few moments of non-fighting scenes, and we get to explore that fully and forcefully in her solo flick. Directed by Patty Jenkins – who had to wait 14 years between her first and second feature film directing credit – from a screenplay by Allan Heinberg, the film re-introduces us to the character, fleshing out the flashy exterior in ways that surprise and touch us.

She journeys from naivety to poise, from innocent to hardened warrior and from privileged princess to self-imposed outsider.

And you cannot separate Gal Gadot from the success of “Wonder Woman.” She embodies the character’s strength and vulnerability, bringing a weighty presence you don’t normally see in a superhero flick. It may just be the best acting performance in this genre since… ever.

Chris Pine acquits himself nicely in the “romantic interest” role normally reserved for a female character, as an American spy infiltrating the German World War I war machine working on chemical weapons of mass destruction.

Danny Huston is his usual sneering self as the chief villain, but I was much more affected by Dr. Maru, the creepy scientist dubbed “Dr. Poison,” played so soulfully by Elena Anaya. With her broken mask and shattered psyche, the character is worthy of her own movie.

In the end, “Wonder Woman” triumphed not just because it was about a female hero, but because the people involved in making it obviously invested so much of their passion and souls into this wondrous film.

Bonus features are quite expansive and exquisite, and are nearly the same for DVD and Blu-ray editions. The centerpiece is “Crafting the Wonder,” a comprehensive making-of documentary.

Probably the highlight is a series of featurettes called “A Director’s Vision,” as Jenkins takes viewers on exclusive behind-the-scenes journeys through filming several key sequences and themes of the picture. There is one bonus new scene and several extended ones, a blooper reel, and interactions with young female filmmakers, poets and other artists who have been inspired by Wonder Woman.

Other features explore her role within the DC Comics “Trinity” with Batman and Superman and creating the Amazonian army.

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Video review: "Legend"

“Legend” is a solid gangster picture and a showcase for the versatile Tom Hardy, who played both halves of the infamous Kray sibling duo, who ruled London’s criminal underside in their 1960s heyday.

Written and directed by Brian Helgeland, based on a book by John Pearson, it tries a little too obviously to be the “British ‘Goodfellas’” -- but if that’s the worst thing you can say about a movie, that isn’t too shabby.

The challenge for Hardy is playing two men who outwardly are very similar but personality-wise are quite different. Reggie Kray was smooth, dapper, an ex-boxer and consummate ladies’ man who liked to run swank nightclubs and hobnob with celebrities. Ronnie was a sociopath -- he’d been committed to psychiatric hospital -- belligerent and bisexual. He was devoted to Reggie but resented the way people were drawn to him, so Ronnie repelled others as a way to compensate.

Even the way the twins talk diverges in Hardy’s interpretation. Ronnie sounds as if he has a mouthful of marbles, through which his harsh cockney accent bleats and spits.

(Hardy, while a monumentally gifted actor, seems to have a contemptuous disregard for comprehensibility. You’ll want to watch this one with the subtitles on.)

Emily Browning plays Frances, who gets courted and wed by Reggie, which she soon comes to regret as they are separated by his partying and prison stints. She narrates the film, performing much the same role as the William Holden character in “Sunset Boulevard.”

Also turning up are Paul Bettany as a rival mobster; David Thewlis as the Krays’ right-hand man; Christopher Eccleston as the London Yard detective on the case; Chazz Palminteri as an American mafia figure offering a business relationship, and danger; and Taron Egerton as Ronnie’s volatile boy toy.

It’s a wonderful-looking film, full of mod clothes and cars and tunes. It really does emulate the style of “Goodfellas,” with breezy scenes intermixed with bursts of horrific violence. These movies are not just trying to depict gangsters as interesting figures, but sex them up into iconic anti-heroes.

Extra features including a feature-length commentary track by Helgeland and a making-of documentary, “Creating the Legend.”

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Review: "The Theory of Everything"

“The Theory of Everything” seemingly falls into the category of what I call “Great Man” movies, which are biopics of historically notable people that attempt to take you behind the public persona and get at the living person behind the façade. “Ray,” “Capote,” “The Iron Lady” are recent examples.

I generally relish these movies, though it seems like there’s a built-in ceiling on how good they can be. They’re usually anchored by an amazing, Oscar-caliber performance that dominates so much it tends to suck all the air out of the film. It becomes a showcase rather than a story.

“The Theory of Everything” has many aspects of the Great Man genre, including a turn by Eddie Redmayne as physicist Stephen Hawking that is sure to generate a lot of talk come Oscar balloting. It’s full of a lot of “behavior,” but also plenty of soulfulness.

But the film is also about Hawking’s relationship with his first wife, Jane Hawking, and how they navigated their romantic lives around his crippling ALS (aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease), which left him confined to a wheelchair at a young age and eventually unable to speak. That’s not surprising, considering this movie is based on Jane’s book about their relationship, adapted for the screen by Anthony McCarten.

Felicity Jones plays Jane, and if she’s not exactly Stephen’s co-equal in the film’s narrative focus, she at least holds her own in her scenes with Redmayne. Together they draw a portrait of love and sacrifice, of limitations both physical and emotional.

This is not so much “the Stephen Hawking story” as the story of the Hawkings.

Director James Marsh has toddled back and forth between documentaries (including the Academy Award-winning “Man on Wire”) and narrative features, and brings a sensibility of observation without trying to strong-arm the story into places where he might want it to go.

He focuses most of his attention on the early part of the Hawkings’ lives, starting when Stephen was a gangly British doctoral physics student who fell in love with Jane, a lover of languages. Even then, Stephen’s physical ticks hint at trouble to come, such as his scrabbly chalkboard writing of equations or the pigeon-toed walk that sometimes barely keeps him upright.

Harry Lloyd and David Thewlis are spot-on in smallish, tidy roles’ as Stephen’s gregarious best friend and mentor, respectively. Emily Watson is used poorly in a cameo as his mother; I suspect her part got cut down during editing.

Marsh and McCarten don’t get too deep into the woods of Hawking’s theories about black holes and the beginning of the universe, focusing more on the poetic aspects that work cinematically rather than the nuts-and-bolts of the actual theorems. It’s probably a wise move, but they stay so far away from the specifics of what made Hawking world-famous that it saps the character’s integrity -- we know he’s important because we’re told he is.

There are some bleak and beautiful scenes in “Everything” as we witness Stephen’s descent into disability, even as his mind reaches for the heavens.

I particularly liked the moment where he, having gotten around for years on a pair of canes, agrees to use a wheelchair. “It’s just temporary,” he stammers out in his warped speech, smiling at the lie he and his spouse have shared. There’s also the scene where he first uses the voice synthesizer that became Hawking’s trademark, joking that people will assume he’s American.

With three children and acclaim descending upon Stephen, they would seem to have all the ingredients for happiness. But the film shows how a life of total selflessness wears upon Jane, a burden she has taken on willingly but comes to resent. When a friendly face appears to help out, in the form of her choir director Jonathan (Charlie Cox), she’s relieved.

Soon he’s incorporated into the family unit like a brother/uncle, and it becomes clear Jonathan and Jane share feelings for each other. Stephen, alert and observant, understands the dynamic and, through his passivity, essentially blesses it. What might seem odd or even perverse to some is rendered into unremarkable normalcy.

Most of the attention for “The Theory of Everything” will focus on the particulars of Stephen Hawking’s condition, and his bravery in rising above it. The real story, though, is about how one loves a great person who is not necessarily capable of fulling returning it, which is deeper and more interesting.

Review: "The Fifth Estate"

Sometimes we whisper.

As a journalist, my first instinct is always toward transparency and holding governments and other institutions of power accountable. As a citizen, though, I understand that some things a group of people does must be kept secret in order for their aims to succeed.

The lines can grow fuzzy, but fundamentally most people understand that in communicating with each other, sometimes we have to shout, and sometimes we must whisper.

The problem with Julian Assange and his website WikiLeaks is they do not make this distinction. While claiming transparency for the whistleblower as its ultimate calling, the group is happy to trample on the rights of individuals and nations in pursuit of what it deems the common good. Sometimes what the site publishes is helpful; sometimes it smacks of leaking secret documents as an end unto itself.

The film version of WikiLeaks’ rise and fall, “The Fifth Estate,” portrays the operation as an amalgamation of journalistic enterprise and gleeful computer hacker playground. The central figure, of course, is Julian Assange, the oddly charismatic leader with long white hair played by Benedict Cumberbatch.

In Cumberbatch’s quicksilver portrayal, Assange is part visionary, part con man and all manipulative bully. We start out admiring his brio and style. But over time it becomes clear that Assange is less concerned with disseminating the truth than making himself the oracle of a new technological age where information flows like water wherever it wants – with a little engineering assistance from Assange and his merry band of groupies.

Director Bill Condon and screenwriter Josh Singer based their film on a book by Daniel Berg, Assange’s former right-hand man who split off at the moment of WikiLeaks’ greatest triumph – the mass publication of thousands of American diplomatic cables leaked by Army Pfc. Chelsea (née Bradley) Manning – who was recently in the news being sentenced to prison.

As played by Daniel Brühl, Berg is a fairly apolitical programmer who gives up his cushy job in the corporate world to help Assange take down a major bank. They come up with a method to protect the identity of their whistleblowers so foolproof they themselves don’t know who is giving them information.

At first, Berg sees this as a strength. He’s all-in on Assange’s method of publishing everything their leakers give them, without alteration. “Editing reflects bias,” he insists.

But over time Berg begins to see how Assange has manipulated him, the mainstream media and the rest of the world.

Condon and Singer opt for way, way too many scenes of men (few women in this club) hunched over laptop computers, typing away furiously as bright beams of colorful gibberish splash across the screens. I can’t help but compare this movie to “The Social Network,” which eschewed the guts of geekery in favor of focusing on the personalities behind the code.

Instead, we’re given recognizable actors (Laura Linney, Stanley Tucci) in small roles where they pop up from time to time and spout something apocryphal for the benefit of the audience, like a British newspaper editor (David Thewlis) bellowing: “He’s the head of a huge global media empire who’s accountable to no one. And we put him there!”

The result is a jangled mess of a movie, Deep Throat meets “War Games.”

Today, WikiLeaks and Assange are largely neutralized. He is essentially a captive inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, subject to immediate arrest and extradition should he ever leave. A visit to the WikiLeaks site shows only four new leak articles posted in the last year, and those restricted to rather obscure matters.

The obsession with leaks continues, with Edward Snowden aided and abetted by mainstream media who ought to know better.

We’ve reached an age where we have substituted the principled whistleblower who leaks a piece of information they think the world needs to know in favor of anarchists who believe the very concept of secrets represents tyranny. So they spill everything in hopes of finding a few drops of insight in a vat of brew. They literally know not what they leak.

“The Fifth Estate” is a better idea for a film than the one they made.

Video review: "War Horse"

"War Horse" got an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture -- plus five other nods -- but little real love. Box office receipts were respectable but hardly stratospheric. The film won virtually none of the various awards for which it was nominated.

The best way to describe the reception given to "War Horse" was one of respectful indifference.

While hardly one of Steven Spielberg's best directorial efforts, "War Horse" certainly deserves better than the miserly regard it's been afforded. It's a lush family drama, sad but redemptive, the sort of ambitious old-fashioned movie-making not seen in great quantities for at least half a century.

As a bonus, the musical score, by constant Spielberg companion John Williams, is one of his best in years.

The star of the story is Joey, a brilliantly fast and spirited horse from England who becomes the object of affection for a variety of people leading up to and during World War I. At first he's the ward of Albert (Jeremy Irvine), a poor farm boy, but then Joey is conscripted into the British cavalry.

As the years roll by and the horrors mount up, Joey's fortunes change as often as the landscape, from rolling French countryside to the nightmarish labyrinth of trench warfare.

Even though the film lacks anything resembling suspense, it's still a fantastically emotional ride.

Video extras are good, though there's a wide chasm between the single-disc DVD edition and the top-of-the-line Blu-ray/DVD combo.

The DVD comes with a single featurette, "War Horse: The Look," which concentrates on how Spielberg and his crew achieved the suffused, painterly look of the film.

Upgrade to the two-disc Blu-ray/DVD combo, and you add two more features. There's a making-of documentary featuring Spielberg and all the cast, and a featurette about the making of the movie from the perspective of an extra.

Go for the four-disc package, and there are four more featurettes. "A Filmmaking Journey" concentrates on Spielberg's artistic journey making the movie. Another focuses on producer and longtime Spielberg collaborator Kathleen Kennedy, including her personal on-set photographs. Two more featurettes focus on editing and scoring, and sound effects.

Movie: B-plus
Extras: B

Review: "War Horse"

For a male weepie, "War Horse" doesn't shy away from what it is. Most such films hide behind a veneer of sports or other manly pursuits in spinning a tale that is designed to reduce every guy watching it to sobs.

But Steven Spielberg's new drama has all the ingredients: fathers and sons struggling to relate, brothers caught up in conflict, soldiers trading kindness amidst the bloodletting, gentle grandfathers and, especially, boys and their beloved animals.

Tears, commence being expertly jerked.

(This is not to imply that women won't weep at it -- I'm sure they will, in bucketfuls. It's just this is the rare weepie specially designed to stimulate Y-chromosome tear ducts.)

What "War Horse" does not have is a romantic component, and for that I am grateful. It's so tiresome to sit through Hollywood movies that seem to throw in a love interest for no reason at all other than brazen demographic appeal (see "Captain America: The First Avenger" for an especially egregious example).

Despite its nearly 2½-hour run time, the movie does not dally unnecessarily, on pitching unneeded woo or anything else.

The titular horse is Joey, the finest thoroughbred in all of England, who was bought for a princely sum by a broken-down old drunk of a farmer (Peter Mullan). Alas, as a result of shelling out 30 guineas for the dappled colt, the farmer does not have the money to pay his sniveling landlord (David Thewlis), who desired the horse for himself.

Of course, wiry thoroughbreds are not terribly useful for plowing fields, but the farmer's headstrong son Albert (Jeremy Irvine) insists he can train Joey to pull a tiller. This sets off the first of many great love affairs, with Joey the perpetual object of affection.

World War I arrives, and Joey is sold off to the British cavalry, breaking Albert's heart. Luckily, the lieutenant who purchases the horse to be his personal mount (Tom Hiddleston) is fine and upstanding, and promises to honor Joey with the same affection Albert did.

Alas, many things go awry during wartime. Over the next four years, Joey finds himself changing masters frequently, with prospects that rise and fall with the capricious whims of war.

For a time he is under the charge of a kindly teenage German soldier (David Kross) and his underage brother. Later, he comes into the embracing arms of a young French girl (Celine Buckens) and her wise, nurturing grandfather (Niels Arestrup).

But Joey also gets conscripted into toting massive cannons, a duty where most horses only last a month or two before collapsing and receiving a merciful bullet. And he becomes trapped in the horrors of the trench war -- a nightmarish landscape of mud, barbed wire and blood.

Based on the novel by Michael Morpurgo, the screenplay by Lee Hall and Richard Curtis -- which also draws inspiration from the Broadway play that won a raft of Tony awards earlier this year -- hits all the expected beats. But despite these rarely arriving without much surprise (one knows exactly how the film will end the entire way), they still hold a rapturous emotional pull -- assisted by John Williams' stirring score of lush strings.

Visually, "War Horse" is quite arresting. Spielberg and his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, intentionally strike an audacious note, composing scenes of suffused color and almost painterly beauty. The effect is theatrical, with the artifice of the visuals drawing the movie out of the grim reality of war and into something like fairy tale lightness.

Because, ultimately, "War Horse" is a children's movie, or something very much like it. It appeals more to the senses and the heart than the mind. Eventually, one has to choose whether to submit to its blatant, wonderfully sad manipulations. I'm glad I did.

3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Anonymous"

"Anonymous" is being hyped as a conspiracy theory story, the gist being that William Shakespeare was not actually the author of all those flowery plays and sonnets. This is not a new idea, as Shakespeare was a commoner of humble schooling, and the Brits retain their class snobbery.

The most common theory I've heard is that his contemporary and fellow playwright, Christopher Marlowe, actually penned "Hamlet" and all the other great works. Marlowe is present in this movie as a minor antagonist, but he's not presented as Shakespeare's doppelganger.

Instead, it's nobleman Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who allowed an actor named Shakespeare to be his frontman. This Oxfordian Theory is dismissed by most literary authorities as loony -- literally, Looney, after the English schoolteacher who came up with it.

But this film is not really about promoting an alternate theory of authorship so much as presenting an intriguing (if unlikely) scenario and seeing how it would play out. It makes for a ripping good story, whether or not it's factual.

For those offended at the idea of director Roland Emmerich taking liberties with the biography of a beloved artist, consider the long cinematic tradition of this M.O. Start with "Shakespeare in Love," which won a Best Picture Oscar for a wholly fictitious take on the Bard's love life. Or "Amadeus." Or "Lust for Life."

In some ways, crafting a fantasy out of the life of an artist is the ultimate tribute to their creativity.

And to those still doing a double-take from two paragraphs above -- yes, this sumptuous period piece is from the filmmaker behind "The Day After Tomorrow," "Independence Day," "2012" and other schlocky blockbusters. All I can say is the German director has traded in disaster flicks for straightforward drama, and takes to it like a duck to water.

Rhys Ifans plays Oxford, a haughty middle-aged lord who summons young Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto), a struggling young writer, to make him an offer.

(Interesting that they call themselves writers, rather than playwrights -- back in Elizabethan times, if you wrote for a living it was plays, or sonnets or poems. Books were too expensive to print to be the basis of a vocation. And newspapers and magazines were still a ways off.)

The earl desperately wants to see his work performed, but his station does not allow him the luxury of being an artist. His idea is to have Jonson pose as the author. Unfortunately, Jonson confides in his friend Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall), a bumbling actor who cannot even write his own name.

Shakespeare suggests he serve as a further buffer between the mysterious nobleman, and jumps at an opportunity to become the most celebrated writer in London.

The story (screenplay by John Orloff) jumps back in forth in time to 40 years previously, when Oxford was a young lord who caught the eye of Queen Elizabeth (played by Joely Richardson as a young woman and by Vanessa Redgrave late in life). The later tale is dominated by a struggle over succession made by a couple of young lords, the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Essex.

In both parallel stories it is the Cecil family of royal advisors, first William (David Thewlis) and then his son Robert (Edward Hogg) who act as Svengali to Elizabeth, manipulating her and twisting events to suit their purposes. Like many villains depicted from this era, they are Puritans who use religion as both shield and weapon.

It is true that "Anonymous" has a very large cast that can often be hard to keep track of. There are also several shocking revelations about hidden ties between various parties, which are as unlikely as someone else writing Shakespeare's plays but still have a delicious impact on their own.

Shakespeare himself remains a rather minor character, which is further evidence that Emmerich and Orloff see the whole Oxfordian Theory as a mere jumping-off point for a great story, rather than the crux of their movie.

3.5 stars out of four